O NE subject has both fired and inhibited Mary Gordon's fic- tion: the nature of parental love bestowed, rationed, and withheld; its power to warp and to aggrandize. She has struggled with that subject- honorably, tenaciously, and sometimes blindly-in three novels. Her fourth, "The Other Side," is the resolution of her struggle. The protagonists of Gordon's fiction are children who have been saddled with their parents' emotional bad debts. In "The Other Side," two such chil- dren play in vacant building lots primed for construction and unearth "inexplicable and random objects. . . a single shoe, a handbag," which fright- en them. The image of those inti- mate possessions gone astray suggests how an unhappy child first glimpses his bereftness. What probably feels so dangerous and sinister about the discov- ery is the child's own rage. But the image also inadvertently suggests why Gordon's earlier novels promised a depth they didn't deliver: she built on the lot without excavating it. In 1978, Gordon made an auspicious début, with "Final Payments." The novel's foundations are those of a fairy tale. Isabel Moore, an only child whose mother is long dead, has lived in her- metic squalor and incestuous content- ment with her father. Joe Moore thinks of himself as a sage among philistines and sinners. The reader perceives him as a devout provincial snob. To Isabel he has been Prospero: "His mind had the brutality of a child's or an angel's." Father and daughter have each successfully destroyed a rival. Isabel's rival is a mean, ugly, and stupid housekeeper with designs on Mr. Moore. The father's rival is his one and only disciple. Three weeks after sur- prising his daughter and the boy in bed, he has the first of several strokes. Isabel, exalted and re- lieved, abandons her lover and embraces her vocation: I was nineteen; I nursed him until he died eleven years later. This strikes everyone in our decade as unusual, barbarous, cruel. To me, it was not only inevitable but natural. The Church exists and has endured for this, not only to preserve itself BOOKS Sad But True but to keep certain scenes intact: My father and me living by ourselves in a one- family house in Queens. The opening chapters of "Final Payments," in which Isabel reflects on her years of bondage, have the wryness, the bleakness, the comic decadence, the claustrophobia, and the magic of a Buñuel film. From Isabel's "intact," "anachronistic" vantage point, Gordon -like Buñuel, an unpious believer but a fervent moralist-can meditate on the fallen world. But it's a vantage point she rushes, inexplicably, to aban- don. The father dies. Isabel sells their dump of a house. She tells an unctuous family lawyer that he can go to hell. She heads straight for the lingerie department of Bloomingdale's, to make up for lost time. And what could have been a brilliant parable about bereave- ment, lust, devotion, solitude, perver- sity, and disenchantment becomes a shopping trip for "experience": a vulgar modern bildungsroman. Gordon's second novel, "The Com- pany of Women," was an orchestral variation on the same theme. F elicitas Taylor is another paragon of learning and inexperience in search of ordinary happiness. She, too, has been reared by a family of parasites which has cleaved her to its bosom while instilling in her a sense of freakish superiority. The family is a cult: the child's mother and four other devoutly Catholic middle- aged women who practice chaste po- lygamy with a charismatic priest With one jealous exception, the women dote upon Felicitas, while the priest-Fa- ther Cyprian-hones her intellect on 97 the flint of his own sinful pride. "She won't throw her life away on some man," he tells her mother. Of course, F elicitas will do just that. She ventures forth to explore "the sewer of the modern world" (Barnard) and to lose her conscientiousness, and she slinks back home to atone for her transgres- sions. Her rebellion and atonement, however, are as contrived as Isabel Moore's. They generate scenes of hip- pie life in the early seventies that fill a dramatic void at the heart of the novel. But those scenes also distract Gordon from the emptiness that Felicitas has been trying to escape: the exhaustion of a child who has "lived all her life between extremes of honor and humili- ation"; who has spent her vitality pro- viding happiness for others. A PROFESSOR of theology once de- scribed to me how, as a semi- narian, he was taught to meditate: by imagining Piero dell a Francesca's "Resurrection" one detail at a time, beginning with the foot of the sleeping centurion and working his way up to Christ's face, in intervals of time marked off by the ringing of a bell. Gordon examines the characters in her first two novels with the same sort of rigorous, rapturous, but finally static intensity of focus. She captures their isolation-an isolation they complain about but revel in, no matter what kind of communal life they lead. She has a marvellous ear for their inner voices- what they yearn to say and can't-but not for their conversation Instead of behaving, they project. And her prose,